Source: Folterknecht, WoTLabs (thanks for emailing me!)
Hi!
To answer that question I spend several hours yesterday testing that out. The sytem used was as follows:
- Win7 Pro 64bit SP1 running from an SSD (Samsung 830 Pro 512GB)
- WoT 0.9.10 was also installed on the same SSD. Using the SD client
- Nvidia 355.98 Driver
- i5 3570K @4GHz (40x 100MHz)
- 2x 4GB DDR3 1866 MHz 9-10-9-28 1T G.SKILL SNIPER
- ASRock Z77 Professional
- GTX960 2GB running at constant 1455 MHz core and 1753 MHz memory speed. VRAM usage between 1 – 1.2 GB
ingame graphic settings
methodology:
RAM and CPU settings were dialed in via BIOS, the system was started running MSI Afterburner (for ingame monitoring) and CPU-Z to make sure all BIOS settings are applied correctly. After that the replay (attached) is run and XVM was outputting a dataset for each benchmark run containing around 3430 data points (one every 0.1sec) listing the current FPS. After the replay was over the system was restarted and the process repeated 3 times for every RAM setting except 2000MHz, there I only made one run. The 3 results for avg, min and max FPS for each speed where averaged.
2133 MHz isn’t possible with the combination of my RAM and motherboard, they top out around 2080 MHz .For 2080 MHz RAM speed I would have to use a differenct BCKL and Multi, making the resulting numbers nearly irrelevant anyway for this comparison, because I can’t hit excatly 4 GHz CPU speed that way.
The result? No real suprise there, WoT does not scale with RAM speed:
| 2x 4GB DDR3 1333 CL9-9-9-24 | 2x 4GB DDR3 1600 CL9-9-9-24 1T | 2x 4GB DDR3 1866 CL9-10-9-28 1T | DDR3 2000 CL10-11-10-32 1T | ||||
| Avg 1. run | 67,5 | 67,5 | 67,7 | 67,7 | |||
| Avg 2. run | 67,4 | 67,7 | 67,7 | ||||
| Avg 3. run | 67,6 | 67,7 | 67,9 | ||||
| Min 1. run | 47,5 | 46,9 | 47,3 | 47,2 | |||
| Min 2. run | 46,8 | 47,3 | 46,8 | ||||
| Min 3. run | 47,3 | 46,9 | 46,8 | ||||
| Max 1. run | 93,3 | 94,3 | 94,3 | 93,5 | |||
| Max 2. run | 92,8 | 92,9 | 94,7 | ||||
| Max 3. run | 93,5 | 92,3 | 96,0 | ||||
| AVG | 67,5 | 67,6 | 67,8 | ||||
| MIN | 47,2 | 47,0 | 47,0 | ||||
| MAX | 93,2 | 94,3 | 95 |
Are there other things to learn here? Well ofc there is still the question to be answered, if that also applies to playing WoT on an integrated GPU, which I’m planning to do in the near future. I ‘ll also post my findings here.
Furthermore I highly recommend using more than 4GB of RAM on a 64bit OS for playing WoT. You can get by with 4GB, if you havn’t polluted your OS with all kind of nonsense running in the background and close all background tasks. But just keeping a browser with several tabs open can in combination with WoT exceed 4GB, which would lead to all kinds of OS-background activity involving your storage. This mainly effects HDD users, but we all know that WoT is sensitive in that regard.
Does more than 8 GB RAM help? Nope, not with playing WoT as long as you dont plan on creating a RAM Disk!
So when you go out and buy RAM it doesn’t matter if it’s 1333 or 2133 MHz – for WoT using a dedicated graphic card with at least 2GB VRAM! But the prices in the US/CA and the EU are more or less the same from 1333 MHz to 1866 MHz (sometimes even 2133 MHz on sale), so I ‘d go for the faster RAM (1st) with the lowest timings (2nd – CL numbers), as there are applications and games where RAM makes a difference, though “relative small”. Just make sure you buy enough capacity and use kits with 2 or 4 modules (3 for trippel channel board like X58 and X79), for the benefits of dual/trippel channel (0-5% performance advantage over single channel).
20151023_2151_ussr-R19_IS-3_37_caucasus.wotreplay
http://wotreplays.com/site/2246165#mountain_pass-f0lterknecht-is-3
Update – Integrated Graphics (iGPU – HD4000)
Ok, now we ‘ll be looking at the iGPU performance of the HD4000 in my i3570K. Hardware, software and methodology were the same as with the GTX960 installed. The HD4000 wasn’t overclocked and the BIOS settings were also the same as with my dGPU. The only additional BIOS setting worth mentioning was 1024MB of shared memory.
Ofc the ingame settings had to be adjusted – I switched back to the old render (standard graphic)
That had the following optical results
| 2x 4GB DDR3 1333 CL9-9-9-24 | 2x 4GB DDR3 1600 CL9-9-9-24 1T | 2x 4GB DDR3 1866 CL9-10-9-28 1T | DDR3 2000 CL10-11-10-32 1T | ||||
| Avg 1 | 45,9 | 48,7 | 50,1 | 50,0 | |||
| Avg 2 | 45,9 | 48,6 | 50,0 | ||||
| Avg 3 | 46,1 | 48,6 | 49,8 | 50,0 | |||
| Min 1 | 28,3 | 30,2 | 31,2 | 32,3 | |||
| Min 2 | 29,3 | 31,7 | 30,8 | ||||
| Min 3 | 30,1 | 30,9 | 32,2 | 32,0 | |||
| Max 1 | 73,7 | 79,0 | 82,0 | 81,2 | |||
| Max 2 | 72,2 | 79,2 | 81,2 | ||||
| Max 3 | 73,4 | 78,5 | 81,0 | 81,6 | |||
| AVG | 46,0 | 48,6 | 50,0 | ||||
| MIN | 29,2 | 30,9 | 31,4 | ||||
| MAX | 73,1 | 78,9 | 81,4 |
Again I made a few runs with 2000MHz RAM speed. This time though the results show something thats worth remembering – higher timings counteract the higher speed to a degree. The increase in performance isn’t that great*.
Puting the 2000 MHz results to the side, we see a performance gain of slightly above 5.5% for avg and min FPS stepping up from 1333 to 1600 MHz. The jump from 1333 to 1866 MHz brings a 8.7% plus for avg FPS and +7.5% for min FPS.
So for little to no price increase we get a decent increase in avg and min FPS in case of an iGPU – not bad. The performance plus for AMDs APUs is even bigger in many games.
*You get get a rough idea of how fast a RAM kit is compared to offers from different vendors or even the same manufacturer by calculating the so called performance index number. I stumbled above this handy little trick in an article by Dr. Ian Cutress from Anandtech. This works as follows:
Divide the speed number of your memory Kit for example 1333 MHz by the timings. In our case its CL 9.
1333/9 ~ 148
Now do the same for the memory kit you want to compare it to (stay within DDR3) – for example
2133/12 ~ 178
As you can clearly see 178 > 148 and therefor in most cases the kit DDR3 kit with 2133 MHz and CL12 will be faster than the 1333 MHz CL9 kit.
